Behold the amplitude of Beth Ditto

Look, its not like I think every article about Beth Ditto needs to be all-fat, all-of-the-time. Heck, I don't even trust the notion of a fat accepting celebrity role model given how many have abandoned size acceptance in the past. But it still seems to me that an interview with an unapologetic fat icon should still treat her size with more respect that to reduce it to some weird indirect parenthetical: "Ditto's fabulous amplitude (in every sense)".

Hey, I'm all for coming up with fun and irreverent ways to reference our fat, its just this seems less like a smirking reclamation than dancing around Ditto's size instead of actually talking about it. Its not the first time I've seen a writer pull this trick when talking about Ditto, introducing her weight with some sort of very "kind" way of pointing it out without actually saying anything. I'm so over these kind of decoder-ring-on-the-cheap method of saying "(get it? cuz she's fat)".

She's fat. She uses the word. So can you. Crafting some "clever" method of obliquely pointing it out frankly strikes me as disrespectful given how "out" she is about her body. I'd have hoped a writer focusing on her unapologetically out stance on her sexuality might have figured that out.

Check out "Round is a Shape"

At the risk of seeming like a fan boy, I've got another link from the fabulous Jaclyn Friedman to share. Over at Amplify, she shares her story as a 9 year old on a diet. As I've come to expect from Ms. Friedman it is bracingly and fearlessly earnest and I highly recommend checking it out.

Cook Food at Salon

Jaclyn Friedman offers an interesting interview with Lisa Jervis over at Salon. Jervis is the co-founder of Bitch Magazine and author of "Cook Food". Its a sort-of "how-to" guide for being a part of the local food movement. Its an interesting an article and especially worth a note to fat activists in that Jervis calls on the pro-food movement to show more skepticism for anti-fat claims from the medical industry.

"What really saddens me about the state of the pro-food discourse about obesity right now is that when Monsanto says genetically modified soybeans are not an environmental problem or a health problem, the pro-food movement is extremely skeptical, and they call that out as total bullshit. Whereas when the medical industry says "fat kills," they're not like: Actually, no, diabetes may kill, but the cause and effect relationship between the two is not as uncomplicated as you'd have us believe."

You will not be surprised that these couple of sentences in a long article are generating disproportionate push-back in the letters section, so feel free to push-back some yourselves.

Straw Fatties

The Philadelphia Daily News brings us the inspiring and unique story of a woman who is trying to lose weight because her husband told her she was too fat. Except, of course, that's not inspiring. Nor is it remotely unique. Men are pressuring their spouses to lose weight all across America right now. Its sad and wrong and something I hope fat acceptance can change.

In this story, though, fat acceptance is the villain because the woman meeting her husband's demands happens to be a celebrity who was fat accepting for pay. So the story makes a lot of fuss over how fat acceptance activists are all flustered.

Give me a break.

Sorry, but sometime around Camryn Manheim's diet I stopped thinking fat celebrities would ever be fat accepting role models. The pressures in our culture already makes fat acceptance an extraordinarily unlikely event. In the entertainment industry its just much worse. Its too easy for people to fall into bland fat stigmatization feelings. And most fat activists I know feel pretty much the same way. Where are these people "angrily abuzz" that the article mentions? I've tried to search for Fat-o-sphere articles that bring it up and I'm finding nothing.

The truth is, the author of the love letter to sexist fat stigmatization is just making this up because she wants to make a point of denying fat acceptance a right to exist. Kimberly Garrison is a professional fat stigmatizer, after all, as a trainer and "fitness journalist". Its all about the enforcement of thin privilege. Or in this case, the privilege of fat hatred. All this hand-wringing and bafflement that fat acceptance has something against fat stigmatization! Don't we know we're not supposed to be fat? Its all well and good that we're for fat acceptance, but surely we can't actually be suggesting that its acceptable to be fat.

Straw fatties are created to try to keep us in our place. To distort our positions so as to lay out the boundaries of acceptable beliefs so we're excluded. I am genuinely saddened at people trying to lose weight. I don't hate them. I just find myself deeply distraught when I hear of what any person is doing to themselves because they think fat is intolerable. I'd love for my first reaction to be anger. Not at the dieters, but at the system. Sometimes I even wish it was ambivalence, but its not. Its sadness. Because I'm not interesting in "knowing my place". I'm fat accepting, but not accepting of fat hatred, too. People like Kimberly Garrison don't expect us to mean what they say. To them, its inconceivable that we ACTUALLY are demanding respect for our bodies and for the bodies of our fellow fat men and women. When confronted with a reminder of that, they sputter and fume. We're not being realistic! We're not being honest! Don't we know the "tramau" we're putting our bodies through? They'll only tolerate the notion that we want fat acceptance for ourselves. They can write us off individually as lost causes. But when they are reminded that we actually want this for other people too, out comes the "but don't you know fat is bad". It shows they were never really listening or caring in the first place. Not that most of us were fooled.

I'm not angry at Mo'Nique for dieting at the behest of her husband. I'm sad about it, just as I am for everyone woman made to feel like this true lost cause is something they must spend their whole life chasing. I'll spare my anger for people like Kimberly Garrison who profit off the promotion of fat hatred.

Fat Hate on Fox News

WTF?

I don't even know what to say about this. FoxNews has decided to explore the meme about how Obama's Surgeon General nominee is too fat for the job. How? By giving national TV time to a professional fat hater who comes on wearing a "No Chubbies" T-shirt.

Seriously.

Cavuto is relatively incredulous, but why is this Karolchyk idiot even being given this kind of platform in the first place? He claims to be the head of the "Anti-Gym", but his gym was closed in January because he owes nearly $200,000 in back taxes. He then got dinged for leaving personal records from his failed gym in an unsecured dumpster. Supposedly, he's now being groomed for a reality TV gig. Inspite of his massive personal failures, he's lately been a regular guest with Neal Cavuto on FoxNews. Hence the chummy attitude from Cavuto even while scolding Karolchyk. This dates back to at least last year, before his IRS troubles, when Cavuto had him on to attack Santa Claus. Actually, google suggests Karolchyk's been a popular guest on Fox, showing up regularly and always saying about the same thing.

He's a clown. And he knows it. He plays up his fat hatred to cartoonish degrees to attract attention. He plays "edgy" for the sake of cameras and dollars. He stages fake fat acceptance protest to use as a foil. He's the kind of guy who trolls FA sites. I frankly would be shoked if he hasn't. He isn't worth caring about. To pretend anything he has to say is worth caring about would be a grave mistake.

So why the hell does FoxNews do just that? He's the news version of comic relief, but his clowning is in support of bigotry and hatred. He isn't standing up for prejudice under some guise of respectability. Heck, he makes Me!Me! look positively reserved. And make no mistake, while this guy is FoxNews' clown, this is a problem throughout the mainstream media. Any of those who are the objects of such hatred are right to look at the news outlets lavishing him with attention and demand answers. The clown is meaningless compared to the person shining a spotlight on them.

Dance fatty! Dance!

So, there is a new fat themed dance show on TV. A reality series about Big Moves and their brand of politically subvercive musical theater? Maybe a profile of China's "Fat and Cool" dance troupe or Cuba's Danza Voluminosa? A visit to one of the hundreds of fat social clubs around the country where fat women can be found dacing and flirting (just like real people!)? A follow-up on former America's Got Talent contestants The Glamazons? Or an insufferable mash-up of "The Biggest Loser" and "Dancing with the Stars"?

Yeah, its "Dancing with Fat Stigmatization".

I knew it was too good to be true when YouTube was promoting a video with what appeared to be scantily attired fat men and women on a TV show. Had to be a catch. Sure enough, YouTube is quickly yelling at me about how I'm going to die if I don't dance myself thin. I heard about this show coming a year ago but I hoped it died in development, but no such luck. The promo video was a cavelcade of fat hate cliche's (where the winner is a loser, DEATH FAT, no one likes fatties, blah blah blah). Its all so boring, but naturally gets dressed up as inspirational and moving. The "sexy" clothing in a show like this takes on a different meaning, because the purpose is not to celebrate one's body but to demean it. Thus, the intention is not to acknowledge the sexuality of fat people, but to mock the notion of a fat person as sexual. At the most, the contestants are only afforded toleration so long as they acknowledge the wrongness of their bodies.

I'm so sick of these shows. Its demeaning and dehumanizing. The only time you see a fat body is when its being paraded about for catcalls and scorn. Screw that. I used to think that the total lack of fat flesh in our popular culture served to turn fat people into an "other", something literally unfathomable for most people because our culture catagorically withheld any pressence of an undressed fat body. Even the fleeting appearances of unclothed fat men for comedic purpose might counteract that, something fat women never saw. They weren't even allowed to be laughed at. Merely pitied and ignored. Well, suffice to say, this BS is not what I was hoping for. There is no context for seeing a fat woman in any state of undress on TV that is not about explicitly and unflinchingly about stigmatizing them. Fat men aren't far behind at this point, either. This isn't humanizing fat people. Its just further entrenching the idea that we are desexualized monsters fit for the disgust of pity of a crowd. I know this is a lot of complaining with little constructive, but right now I feel like the complaint just needs to be aired. Since gosh knows anything that makes fun of fat people has no trouble getting aired.

And don't get me started on the Fat Bachelor (with Fat Bachelorettes). As an FA (Fat Admirer), I'm dreading the inevitable "twist" where the show pretty much disrespects my identity as prefering a fat partner. You know its coming. I hope I'm wrong. Its bad enough that it seems to imply that fat people can only hope to be with fat people, though the promo does suggest that the Fatchelor is an FA. I just don't expect the show to respect that. I think it'll downplay it in favor of a more simplistic notion of fat ghettoization and then dangle out the prospect of doing "better" than a fat partner to either the female suitors our the male bachelor. I just don't trust TV to deal with fat people with any respect. Would love to be proven wrong, but its not like our popular culture doesn't have a VERY consistant track record.

Fat Justice

Okay, maybe not fat so much as identifiably not exceptionally thin, but President Obama today announced his intention to nominate the relatively average sized Sonia Sotomayor to be a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. You may recall a couple weeks ago Judge Sotomayor, widely rumored to be up for the nomination, was smeared on the Letters page at Salon for being to fat for consideration. The notion being that nominating a fat person is a waste of a nomination since fatties are just going to die on you.

The writer was actually providing a glimpse into a short-hand attack on Sotomayor. Not content to just call her fat, the writer also calls her diabetic. I suspect her diabetes status will get brought up a lot in the coming weeks as a proxy for her weight. It'll be a useful short-hand given the way diabetes is regarded as a moral failure by much of our society. It will be used to conjure up not just the image of a fat woman, but as a reminder of Sotomayor's lower-class upbringing. Her story is genuinely inspiring, but we've already seen efforts to paint her as a stereotype. Smears are out that she isn't really very bright, even though she was a top student at Princeton and Yale Law at a time Latinos from the Bronx weren't even treated equally, much less the imagined preferential treatment that is a bogeyman for white conservative males. She gets accidentally labeled a "Latina single mother" in spite of her not having any children, a none-to-subtle effort to talk in code linking to other frequent cultural targets of the Right. Her being diabetic is already being trotted out for much the same reason. Its meant to feed into a stereotype.

The ironic thing is, she has Type I Diabetes. Which not only is nor correlated with being fat, is actually correlated with being thin. Not that you'll ever hear it called that way. If something is correlated to fat, then fat causes it. If something is correlated to thinness, then its just not correlated to being fat. Not that it should matter, mind you. What we're seeing here is an effort to concern troll about diabetes as a proxy for criticizing her for her not quite thin body. Its an effort to trade of social judgment of fat as a moral failing to make a political hit.

Thin people drink soda

I seem to be seeing soda-based freak outs a lot lately. Its long been a favored thing to blame fat people on, but now that the economy is struggling, that fear is mutating into a desire to tax it like cigarettes.

Listen up. Soda isn't like cigarettes. The correlation between smoking and disease is very high. The supposedly slam-dunk correlation between fatness and disease is much, much, MUCH smaller than the smoking link. Mean, the link between smoking and cigarettes is pretty well established. The link between soda and fatness? Well, not so much proven or evidence based, but gosh doesn't it seem like there are tons of fatties these days? I don't think people drank soda back in the time before fatness. That must be to blame. That or any of the other thousand guesses people have. Oh, except dieting. Mustn't point out that people DIET way more than they used to and DIETING actually has been shown to induce weight gain unlike soda.

Like with trans-fat, I'll allow that there might be cause for concern with corn syrup, though it seems mostly conjecture. But if HFCS is the villain of this story, go after it. Don't promise an end to the fatness, because its not going to happen. Right now, as I type, thin people are drinking soda and not turning into big ol' fatties. Honest. Look it up. Like most "end fatness" schemes, this one will fail but another will rise from the ashes. The phoenix of fat hatred always seems to live another day.

Results Typical

"Results Not Typical" is one of my favorite retorts to diet mongers. Its really all you need to say when someone tries to "refute" Fat Acceptance with a diet success story.

Results. Not. TYPICAL.

It doesn't matter that diets work some of the time. That's not the issue. The issue is that they don't work reliably or consistently. A "success" at dieting as not typical. That diet companies have been forced to append this message on their ads has been a humiliation. Unfortunately, its also a humiliation no one seems to notice. I mean, no other product needs to keep announcing its ineffectiveness in its ads. iPods don't have disclaimers announcing "product does not produce sound". Yet, no one seems to care. The diet industry has quite efficiently gotten everyone to ignore their admission of futility and continuing selling their product. They do this because on some level, every knows that diets don't work. They are actively engaged in self-deception from the get-go. "Oh, sure, diets fail. For other people. Not me, though. I'm gonna really try." Our culture is so involved with fat shaming that the failure of diets is never blamed on the diets. Its ALWAYS blamed on the dieter. They must not have wanted to be thin. Its preposterous, but its what our culture does.

So, I'm not exactly encouraged by the word that the FTC is going to require even stricter standards in diet ads. Now, companies can't just qualify their testimonials with "Results Not Typical." They will need to actually show typical results. I figure there are three reasons to expect this won't change things and might even make them worse.

The first reason is what I've already discussed. The failure of diets isn't exactly a secret, but its still one the diet industry has remained effectively blameless for. I'm not sure this will ultimately do much to challenge those prejudices. But ultimately, I don't think its even going to be an issue because of a combination of my last two reasons.

First, is that presumably, this will only apply with a diet company wants to use a testimonial. While these "I did it, so can you bits" are a cliche, we should remember that its not like they are a legal obligation either. Look at the recent "Hunger" spots from Weight Watchers. They make no specific claims. They don't show you any success stories. Rather, they talk about dieting in abstract, experiential terms. Their marketing department is savvy enough to know that people don't need to be sold on wanting to lose weight. This is an implicit desire for virtually the entire population. So, they let this work for them and shield themselves from explicit promises and let the viewer fill in the rest. So, "counter testimonials" might just not be an issue if advertisers just move away from testimonials. I'm not convinced they need the testimonials to promote their wares. The market is just too willing. Put up a road block, and the companies will just drive around it.

The other concern I have is how we are going to define "typical" results. This actually worries me more, because it gives the companies an incentive to move backwards. I mean, they all insist the testimonials are typical now. No diet company willingly instituted "Results not typical". This will ultimately come down to diet peddlers doing more to justify their fantasies. They'll cook the books, exclude failures, etc. to "prove" that the atypical is actually typical. Thus, the result of the stricter standards actually relieves them of any restrictions because it gave them an incentive to push back against something that ultimately has little political will to resist. It sounds nice, but I don't trust it. Advertisers will just offer bogus substantiation and now their still false claims will have a veneer of truthiness. "Why, it must be true if they don't say 'results not typical'" It will be just as much of a fraud as before, only now companies have a substantial incentive to defend that fraud. Frankly, I don't think there will be any substantive resistance when diet makers pretend their magical stories are true. They never proved any of this in the first place, and everyone still thinks its all true. I just don't think the bar will be very high for them to justify false expectations and all of this will just further fuel the culture of fat shaming that blames dieters and not diets. Then we'll have lost even the small counterpoint of "Results not typical". Count me as worried about this. I don't trust the diet industry for a second, and I trust our fat shaming Society just as little.

Fat art in Boston

Anyone in Boston might want to check out the Herb Ritts Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts through May 10. The Photographic Figures exhibition features "Venus of Willendorf '91" by Harriet Casdin-Silver a feminist artist known for her work in holograms.

The piece was originally made for the cover of the magazine Sculpture in 1991. Its a stunning piece featuring a woman modeling as a stand-in for the famous Venus sculpture. One isn't used to seeing a fat person in this kind of artistic context. Especially given the realism of holography. The form is emphatically real in a culture which too often tries to negate the reality of fat bodies. Its a small piece, but one well worth seeing. Especially encouraging is the item description. A lot of "fat" art is really art the fat positive community appropriated from artists who depict our bodies as metaphors without much interest in our humanity. In this case, the artist set out to create fat positive art. The model isn't just a fat woman. The photographer sought out a fat activist to pose for the piece. Very cool.

The MFA galleries are open to the public on Wednesday evenings and of course there is plenty else to see while you're there (I'd personally recommend the musical instrument collection) so if you have a chance try to check it out.